Plenty of Republicans have run for office while espousing conspiracy theories about the Obama administration or the United Nations, but the next generation of conspiracy theorists are running office on platforms that are dumber than anything you could could ever imagine.
The Daily Beast reports that the only Republican running for Congress in Florida's 5th congressional district is a believer in QAnon.
Matthew Lusk, a Florida bookseller who launched his House campaign for Florida’s 5th congressional district last month, appears to be the first QAnon follower to run for federal office. His candidacy was first reported by Florida Politics, a state politics blog. According to FEC registrations, he is currently the only Republican in the contest to run in the general election against, in all likelihood, Rep. Al Lawson (D-FL).
Lusk told The Daily Beast that he’s not a “brainwashed cult member.” Still, he thinks the online posts that have made up QAnon since October 2017 are a “legitimate something.”
If you're not familiar, "QAnon" is a belief that Donald Trump is waging a campaign against a global cult of pedophiles who secretly run the world. You know, kind of like the Illuminati, but creepier. They believe that Pizza-gate -- the idea that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza parlor that has no basement -- was just one example of this global conspiracy.
Followers of QAnon believe this information is being handed to them by a person or group of persons within the federal government known as Q (Q Anonymous, or QAnon), but this conspiracy theory originally appeared on the shit-posting hellhole known as 4Chan before it migrated to Reddit. Now, you may occasionally see QAnon t-shirts and posters show up at Trump's unhinged klan rallies.
Someone with this little ability to recognize a fantasy when they see one has no business even being a public librarian, much less a member of Congress.